Our vision for precision psychiatry and neuroscience is to translate insights about the human brain into real world clinical care – to improve the quality of individual lives.

What We Do

Why We Do It

Our current projects focus on depression and anxiety, with research that embraces individual differences in the experience of mental health disorders, and the associated disruptions to social and emotional function. Emotion and cognition are two hallmark features of mental health disorders. Using an integrative approach with MRI, EEG, behavioral testing, genetics, symptoms, and daily functioning data, our research projects aim to:

Delineate neural circuitry for emotional and cognitive functions,

Examine how this circuitry becomes dysregulated in depression and anxiety,

And assess how it is expressed in individual variations in subjective and behavioral symptoms.

Mental health disorders are the leading cause of disability worldwide (depressive disorders account for about 40% of the disability, and anxiety disorders are about 15%). Advances in human neuroscience give us a better understanding for why one treatment works and another does not - but we have not yet bridged the translational divide between the evidence and how to apply this information in the real world. To improve this situation, we need to provide more successful treatment.

We have Postdoctoral and Research Positions available. Check out our Opportunities page for more information regarding these opportunites!

PanLab News ​

Click below to learn about recent news in the PanLab. Check out our news page for more.

Dr. Leanne Williams - Key Note Speaker at ASNR Symposium

JUNE 4, 2018 - Dr. Leanne Williams, key note speaker at the American Society of Neuroradiology (ASNR) symposium in Vancouver, presented her research on ‘Translation of Advanced Neuroimaging for Psychiatric Diseases to the Clinics' during the symposium session ‘Value of Neuroimaging for Psychiatric Disorders.’ This session was co-moderated by collaborator Max Wintermark, MD from Stanford and Jay J. Pillai, MD, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine

MAY 24, 2018 - Dr. Leanne Williams, Director of the Williams PanLab and Stanford’s Center for Precision Mental Health, was an invited speaker at the Stanford's Big Data in Precision Health conference during the Digital Health and Technology session. Her presentation titled ‘Data Driven Precision Mental Health’ highlighted how deep data about neuroscience connected with big data about day to day function will transform our models of mental health and their translation into real world clinical application.’

Although occasional mild anxiety is a common human experience, anxiety disorders such as social anxiety disorder have a devastating impact on patients’ lives. A key feature of social anxiety disorder is avoidance of situations in which judgment and evaluation from others might occur, which prevents patients from engaging fully in work, school, and relationships. This maladaptive avoidance is thought to maintain anxiety and is therefore a crucial treatment target. In this project, Tali aims to validate a novel virtual reality paradigm to objectively assess maladaptive avoidance in adults with social anxiety disorder, and to examine how maladaptive avoidance behavior relates to fear and safety learning. The project is funded by the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation’s NARSAD Young Investigator Award. Congratulations, Tali!

PanLab Neuroscience PhD Arielle Keller Tackles inequality in STEM

JUNE 6, 2018- Check out Arielle Keller's efforts to advocate for underrepresented groups in STEM: https://neuroscience.stanford.edu/news/tackling-inequality-stem-dive-data